THE ROLE OF CULTURE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Not all teachers and their students are concerned with the culture of target language. Culture is so central to the teaching language system that it is hardly possible to talk about that system without the word culture cropping up in the first few sentences. It is the purpose of this article to examine the role of culture in language teaching and then in the light of this examination consider some fundamental conclusions it raises. First, a brief history of culture presentation in the language class is mentioned.
In the nineteenth century the question of relating language to culture did not arise with particular urgency. Nevertheless, since the reform movement in the last century and even before, language teaching theorists repeatedly stated that an important purpose of language learning was learn about a country and its people.
Thus in the post- war word the idea of the study of language combined with the study of culture and society was familiar to most theorists. This view point is reflected in the post- war writing on language pedagogy.
The leading works on language teaching theory of the last few decades (for example, Lada, Brooks, Rivers and Chastain) have all firmly stated that cultural understanding and cross-cultural comparisons are a necessary component of language pedagogy.